Oh dear. I was hoping we had one of those over at Green Gulch and I was hoping there wasn't such a thing in Berkeley. I spent my whole life in front of one of those things. What I really would like to be doing now is hibernating. Ever since I've been very small, I recognize that my brains go south with the sun. And it would be wonderful not to have to do anything but sleep for November, December. Then soon as the first full moon after the equinox, after the solstice starts, I'm right back. A couple of months from now you can come back and I'll give you a talk.

[01:02]

But a teacher once told me that we should, when we sit on this seat, speak about what is directly in front of us. And what is directly in front of me at this present time is overpowering homesickness. So if you will allow me to flounder around in the mud and the weeds, maybe something can be revealed that might help us all in our practice. I certainly need it. I don't know about you, but what does the old spiritual say, standing in the need of prayer? So let me tell you how it started and those of you who are worrying that there's not going to be any Buddhist text to this talk, let me line one out. The sixth Chinese ancestor has said, from the beginning, not a thing is.

[02:12]

And another teacher said, that's why we have to make it all up. So let's explore homesickness in the light of from the beginning, not a thing is. And on the other side, we have to make it all up. When I get in a state like this, there's a lot of wandering around in the car, just driving. And I found myself at China Camp in Marin County, which I remember from my first visit of over 40 years ago, when it really was the place where a number of Chinese families fished for shrimp. And they ended up in Chinatown, and if you walked down the alleys, you could see the old grandmothers sitting around the great big baskets of shrimp, shelling them. And those bay shrimp, I don't know if they still sell them in the restaurants anymore. They're the tiniest shrimp.

[03:14]

You really know what a shrimp is when you have a bay shrimp. Now there's only one family left. And the place has become a museum, about as big as this room, of the Chinese history of shrimp fishing in San Francisco Bay. And I stood there on the beach on Susan Bay, looking sort of towards Karkina Strait, and I was seized with the overpowering desire to go into one of the shacks that are still there, down from the restaurant place, and turn on the kerosene stove, and get out the old, cracked, enameled teapot, and the teacup without a handle, and sit there and watch the light disappear from Suzun Bay. I cannot describe to you how much I wanted to do that. Of course, I had to go back to Green Gulch and do evening service, so I didn't have a chance to pursue it anymore.

[04:21]

But then I realized that I'd had that feeling at the time I'd been at Canyon du Chez. Has anyone here been to Canyon du Chez? We'd gone there after... My wife always wanted to show me the Grand Canyon. So she took me to the Grand Canyon, but I didn't see it. It was too big to look at. I found myself focusing on the closest rock or that little tree that was growing out. I never saw it. Canyon du Chez is sort of intimate. It's a personal sized valley. And you can wind down to the bottom very gently and you take your shoes off and you wade across the river and you see the fantastic ruins left by the old people. And then You hear a tinkle of bells and a Navajo woman in a blue shirt and silver jewelry and red skirt rounding up the goats. And then you start home and you come to a hogan growing by a single cottonwood tree.

[05:22]

And what do you want to do? You want to go in and say, hi, I'm home. So here are these two recent experiences of this overpowering homesickness Now, first place, monks are home leavers, right? That's an epithet for a monk. And I have been a home leaver since I've been this high. I wanted to do nothing else but get away from home. So I'm very puzzled by this. It was some sort of a nonverbal con. It was a feeling con. but it was tremendously powerful. So I wondered what is this connection between Old Fish Shacks in Marin and Navajo Hogan's in Arizona and the last home that I had in Connecticut in Litchfield County

[06:30]

My parents are buried at Stone's Throw from one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The place has got two streams on it. Used to be trout in the streams. It's the ideal place to live. In fact, all the people who don't want to live in the Hamptons anymore in Long Island are now moving up into Litchfield County. But I remember the day that I left there, I was so sick I almost died. I was both throwing up and running off at the other end. I had to go and I didn't want to go, and I had to go and I didn't want to go. And I've had this problem that you can see for a long time. And I wondered, what is this connection between all these homes? And finally it came to me because I've had the good luck to go to Glen Ellyn and see Jack London's old place. You've been to Glen Ellyn?

[07:32]

The famous oyster pirate and Klondike adventurer and writer from Auckland. And he built this wonderful home which then was burned down under suspicious circumstances. of it. It quoted him as saying he built this to be his ancestral home and that hit me like a ton of bricks. How can you build your ancestral home? And that was a clue because up in Connecticut you see these ancestral homes that have been there. They have on the door. The first time I went to Litchfield I wondered what a strange town it was because The house numbers didn't work. There'd be 1792, and right next to it 1687, and then 1812. So I went to the post office, and I said, what do you do about this? And he says, oh, these people come down to the post office to get their mail that we don't deliver to them.

[08:37]

I said, well, what do they got house numbers on for? Because that's the year they were made. The house was built. So one of the things I think that is connected with home is this business of continuity. It goes way, way back. When you're polishing the family silver or pewter the way your parents did and your grandparents did. And when you go out and work in the garden, you know that your ancestor was doing the same thing maybe with a rifle next to his home because of the Indians. And you figure, if I could be here in this house, then everything would be wonderful because I would have a whole life to which I could add my small life and then it would be a great big life. But that didn't help very much because I do have such an ancestral home. It's over in Switzerland and it was built in the years before Columbus discovered America and the family still lives in it.

[09:38]

So my roots go back that far and here I am wandering around looking for my home. Security is another thing. When we see the pictures on the television screen of the people huddling in the wreckage of their homes that have been destroyed by earthquakes, for instance, or homes destroyed in military activities, we recognize that security is another thing that we yearn for. But security in a fish camp? Security in a Navajo Hogan? What is going on here? So I had to dig a little deeper into that question. And what I've come up with, which I would like your comments on when we're through, is something which I'm absolutely certain is a common denominator to all of our lives.

[10:46]

We have dream homes and some of us are fortunate enough perhaps to be able to create the form of the home in some proximity to the dream. You saw in the Chronicle this morning a $60 million three-room house in Hawaii. This was the dream, yes, this was the dream of a famous architect of the absolute perfect house. So it's more than just me. It's a common denominator that runs through all our lives. This deep yearning for something which, as Buddhists, we are told cannot exist. Transiency comes. Let me tell you how I experienced transiency in Connecticut. I go back every couple of years. My sister still lives in the ancestral home. And I go visit and it's as though my mother was in the next room.

[11:51]

Everything is exactly as it was. My sister sort of keeps the shrine that way. And I make a pilgrimage every year to the family graves and then I walk back through the picture postcard town of Litchfield and deep in thought, you know, and I turn the corner And there is a combination fort and roadside restaurant-looking thing with iron gates and bronze dancing girls, swans on an artificial pond, and Arabian horses in the paddock in the middle of this ancient American scene. So I go back to my house, it's very shaken, and say to my brother-in-law, who was an ex-Treasury agent, what is that just across the hill?

[12:56]

He says, oh, that's the local mafia man. He has moved in. He's going to be a country gentleman. So transiency undermines, along with the termites, all of the structures that we had this emotional response to. But that doesn't help very much when you're in the grip of it's one thing to know that this is going on and another thing to have this feeling that maybe you have suppressed all your life. You have never allowed yourself to have it. Because you see, there's a flip side to all of this. In the first house that I was raised in, we had five Christmas trees at Christmastime in one house. There were servants, there were trips to Europe. We didn't have a box at the opera, but we had seats in the family circle.

[13:58]

Fields led down to the water and there were long-stemmed violets to pick, and then there were wild strawberries to pick, and then there were strawberry festivals with ladies in long white dresses underneath the Japanese lanterns underneath the elms where Fox once preached to the Indians. All gone now. It's all three-story apartment houses and more. So I've known about transiency, and I left that place, and I left the one in Connecticut. Then I went to Tassajara and I left that and I'm at Green Gulch. Then I get in the car at Green Gulch and I'm driving around to get away from Green Gulch. And all the time what I'm looking for is my home. None of these places anymore resonate. I don't feel at home in Green Gulch. I used to say, every time I came here, I feel at home, but not really. My Berkeley home of Zendo, my Berkeley Buddhist home, is down there in Dwight Way. where I used to sit in front of those two narrow windows up in the attic of Mel's old house, knowing that if I had to, I could get out those windows.

[15:12]

And then Mel said, look, you're an older student now, would you please come up and sit near the altar? So I moved up behind the chimney, and there was this big brick impediment that would keep me completely protected from anything that was emanating from the altar, you know. So, where is my home? And why do I feel so bad that I can't find it? And why do I want to take these robes off and give them back? Which I was told I could do anytime. Anytime I wanted to, I could take my acacia off and put it in a closet. So, this is how I, in the state of mind, I have come here today. But fortunately, having sat now for some 22 years, a little bit of space has been created whereby something like this experience can be looked at from a slight remove.

[16:25]

I could see myself on the beach at China Camp going through this whole process and at the same time not going through it. That's the best I can tell you. I mean, it was as though I was observing myself doing this fantastic business of getting involved with... I mean, how do I know there's a kerosene stove in that shack? How do I know that there's a broken teacup in there, you know? This is the making it all up. And the interesting thing, and here we loop around and get back into Buddhism, in case you've been holding your breath. How is he going to make it back? I learned something of Buddhism long before I ever came to Zen Center. I had this daily radio program on CBS for eight years over in San Francisco, and I knew that while anybody could go and interview the people that I talked to, see the places that I had been, they would never find the city that I was creating every morning. It was a dream city in the sky.

[17:28]

And lo and behold, if you read Nagarjuna, you will come across exactly that statement. The common reality, he says, is a dream city in the sky. The common reality of shared homesickness is a dream city in the sky. We each have a little different slant on it, but we're all going through the same process that I've been describing. So that was a great help. But then I began really to get pretty anxious and pretty worried. I'm getting on in years, as they say. And I've been around this circle a number of times before. I've been around it as a Christian. I've been around it as a humanist. I've been around it as a Marxist. I've been around it now for 22 years as a Buddhist. And the same thing is happening. It's all coming apart. these perfect blueprints for homes and they're not always, you know, internal homes also, you know, mind objects.

[18:34]

You get this beautiful blueprint and you build a house and just as you put the last turn of the screw on it, it blows, it breaks. So what do you do? You go and get a new set of blueprints and you clear the ground and you're going to start a new home on that space. And that happens again. Now I don't know how I would say that from a Buddhist viewpoint, but I will give you my memory of my Christian experience to see maybe you can tell what I'm talking about. I was a very devout Christian. By inheritance I was going to be a minister. And one day, I found myself writing this. When I was young, I lived with God. And in my innocence, I loved him, beard and all. But he was old and with a sense of sin and jealous in a very nasty way.

[19:37]

So every time my youthful eye would stray, he'd drag me home, take down his book, and read to me of love that others gave. One day, God caught me in a field with Homer, who also had a beard, but his was red. God let out such a roar that Homer fled. But when he stuck out his dusty foot for me to kiss, I clutched it to me, rose up, and threw him down. He hit his head upon a common stone. God was dead. Then I went home and burned his book. And on his wine, stayed six days drunk to wake up sober in an empty room. Well, I showed that poem to only one person, a Marxist. And he looked at me and said, don't you ever show that to anybody. Wow. So I figured, what have I done? So I put it away. I didn't show it to anybody until we had a poetry meeting, a poetry evening over at Green Gulch. And I was asked to participate.

[20:39]

And I hadn't written any poetry about since that time. But Brother David was the one who was organizing the evening. So I went up. For those of you who don't know, Brother David is a wonderful Benedictine monk who is a very good friend of Zen Center and has been on our board of directors. So I went up to this Benedictine monk and I showed him this poem and I said, do I dare read it? He says, of course. And I did. And I realized that what I had been doing with all these past lives is putting another God in the blank there. This Christian God didn't work, okay, I'd get a humanist God. That one didn't work, I'd get a Marxist God. And I would get a Buddhist God. Now, if you have been taking classes or doing reading, you know that Buddhism is a strange religion, a religion without a creator, without a savior, and no one to be saved.

[21:43]

So what's all the fuss about? And now we're down to the nitty-gritty. All these things are human activity, human responses to the desires that lie so deep we hardly ever even see the source of them. The searching for, the finding of, the losing and the breaking down, and we go around and around and around. Technically, it's called putting yourself back on the wheel. So, it's what I've been doing. Now, how do you get off? You don't. You just go around with your eyes open, and then you see, after a while, how you are making it all up.

[22:47]

And when you know that you're making it all up, and that you have to make it all up, and that there's no way of getting out of the making up, you have a wonderful question. What are you going to make up? If it's not this, and not this, and not this, neti, [...] what are you going to make up? Anybody here, student of Jung, read anything of Jung? His idea of individuation has been presented as bodhisattva work. A bodhisattva, from a Jungian position, is someone who has completely individuated himself. That is, he has come to the realization of his or her own person and integrity, and at the same instant has offered that to the well-being of all sentient beings. The two things go together.

[23:48]

From a Jungian position, it would be you are enlightened and then you go out and do things for other people. You don't do all of these things for other people in order to get enlightened. You start out there. So, how do you become a bodhisattva? And there's only one way, and that is zazen, the only way. When you sit in the pasture of the Buddha, the realization of the Buddha comes to you out of the same source that came to historical Shakyamuni. All sutras are nothing but footnotes on Sazen. So remember what the Buddha said on the moment of his enlightenment, everybody can do it. He didn't say, wow, I've got it, or something like that. He says, everybody has this ability, and he was talking about you and me.

[24:51]

So this home that we're looking for may be reflected to us in buildings and people and books and pictures, but it's not what we're really looking for. What we're really looking for is the experience out of which all of these things come. For instance, this bowing that we do as Buddhists is all of the teaching. This is right, this is left. This is right, this is wrong. This is up, this is down. This is heaven, this is hell. This is good, this is bad. This is man, this is woman. This is past, this is future. Those of you who study philosophy know we're talking about the dichotomies here. Cut anything in half and you got two pieces. So when you sit, you experience down here, not up here, that before there's a right and a left, there's a One. And out of this One, like a fountain, come all these rights and lefts, and then you can enjoy them, and you can handle them, and you can do with them whatever you want to do.

[26:01]

But as long as we go about looking for the solution, we never find it. It's been said, Zen does not solve problems, it dissolves them. When you don't have the problem anymore, you don't have to look for the question, you don't have to question anymore, you don't have to look for the answer. It's beautiful. So, I'm hoping that by the next time I see you, I will be able to report that I don't care about homesickness. Right now, I sure do. Nothing I would like better than to win the lottery and get a first class ticket back to Connecticut. I would just go. It's in my present state of mind. That's how strong it is. But I can see that having looked for this for a lifetime and not found it,

[27:11]

that I had better listen to the teachings and do what Suzuki Roshi told me to do. For instance, the first time I had Dōkasan with Suzuki Roshi, I was tooling up a question. I was stropping my dialectical razor. I was going to... This little man looked like a gardener for God's sake. What is all the fuss about, you know? And so I wait out in the hall and then the bell rings and I go in and I sit down and I adjust myself and I take a deep breath and I look into his eyes and I start to bawl. All gone, Roshi, all gone, wife, children, job, all gone. So he says, I think you should go sit some more. Now what he did at that moment, which I only recognize now,

[28:12]

is that he opened the door to my ancestral home. He said, come on in, sit down, boy. But I've never met a man like that in my life. I was scared. S-less, huh? Really was. And so I've spent all of the years since then trying to evade the one opening. Oh, brother. Other people have reported saying he was totally accessible to anybody who wanted to meet him. If you were there, he was there. So it was my good fortune to meet him, and my bad karma to run like hell in the opposite direction. But, many teachers have said, Lou, you are a stubborn son of a... I'm like the mule that someone sold to a friend, and the seller said, this mule will do anything you ask him to.

[29:22]

Good mule. So the next day, the guy was back, dragging the mule at the end of a halter, and said, you just sold me a bill of goods. This mule won't do a damn thing. So the man went and got a two by four. And he gave that mule a real whop on the flank. And then he said, now you pull that plow. And the mule pulled the plow. The guy said, first you've got to get his attention. So I think what's happened all of these years, beaten on me with two by fours, to get me to pay attention to the one thing that this is all about. Namely, you are already at home. There's no home to look for. This is it. Maybe the roof leaks, you know, maybe the termite's in the basement. This is home, no matter how it is. And then wherever you go is home. You're at home everywhere. There is no fixed point. There is no fixed point of view.

[30:24]

There's no body there to get home. And yet at the same time, you see, this is the wonderful thing, I guess, about this practice. You have it both ways. You have the certainty You connect it with the lineage. And also, incidentally, this posture does not just go back 2,500 years, it goes back 30,000. Mahama Govinda has traced it back that far, and they have found people seated in cross-legged meditation, little figurines, that carve and date within a few thousand years of 30,000. So if you're looking for your home, the entryway is in this posture, which is all teachings present to us. Immobile sitting. You maintain that, and sooner or later, this insight will come to you about your own life, which will be totally different for each of you. You're all as different as your fingerprints, right? And no two people are alike. No two meditation experiences are alike.

[31:26]

But, from the periphery, from the circle of the wheel down into the empty place with the Axel goes through. When you're there, that is where you meet everybody, and then there's no going or coming. I guess that's as much as I can get out today. Anyone have any questions that I Why is the longing for the dream home, which is somewhere else, outside of your own, or beyond your personal experience right now, why is that so strong? Why is that such a common theme?

[32:33]

It's strong, I think, because I always knew it, and spent over 70 years, running away from Suzuki Roshi, if you want to reduce it, I think that's why it's so small. Something that, I was there, and what did I do with my life? Threw it away trying to get, you know, what does it say in one of our sutras, grasping things is basically delusion. The thing of a real home, putting all of my efforts and enthusiasms into whatever home I was building at the moment, was not where it was at. But the generation of that energy, was a yearning to return. And none of us, I fully believe, know that we are at home until we've gone through some sort of experience to show us. I mean... Well, I just want to say I have that very strong yearning too.

[33:34]

And the question is not just... I think so. I think we all have it. We take a different approach. Each of us takes a little different approach to it. But that I think... See, I feel that along with those inherited genetic qualities, such as the need for food, the need for reproduction, the need for protection from the weather and a few other things, that more important than that is the religious impulse. That, I think, underlies even those things. And we so seldom have a chance to get through all this other stuff to understand that religion. And I would say the religious impulse is the impulse to return home. And it's frequently, in the Zen literature, it's like meeting your father at the crossroads. You've wandered and wandered and wandered, and all of a sudden, my God, I'm home! But you have to evidently do the wandering in order to come to the realization that you've always been home. And that, I guess, is what I mean by karma.

[34:38]

I think, I mean, just because I'm sitting up here doesn't mean that I know it. But this is what I feel. Yeah? I was thinking in your picture of your original dream of being a little boy with the Father, God, and you felt at one. And yet your home is now a place rather than a relationship. And I have the same thought. a homesick feeling, but it's like for heaven in Christian time. It seems to me that there's, I mean, it's like out there, the task is to make it inside. That's true. You see, in those days, God the Father, you know, was someone who took care of his flock, huh? Right. And then when suddenly you realize that you lost it, you know, flaming sword at the entrance to the garden, you were never going to get back in again, that's pretty awful. But you're right, and as long as it's out there in any way, and it can be out there in here too, you know, but until it comes down into a unity with your immediate experience, you're always wandering.

[35:47]

Maybe the circle that you're wandering around has been greatly reduced, You understand? But you would accept it not as something that you had to do, but just because that was... Even the Bible says so. Whatever cometh to thy hand, that do and cheerfully. So whatever is in front of you, you cheerfully embrace, you cheerfully do. And it also says that the slightest discrimination arises, you know, separation is greatest from heaven and earth, you know. You know, these clichés. that come to us from all religions have to be paid attention to, because they arise out of a real thing. But you're absolutely right, right. And I have to go now, when I leave here, and go back and live with 45, 50 people in a community that I don't feel at home in.

[36:56]

I mean, I had a hard time with 5 people in the nuclear family. 55 people? Any one of them has got you? your attention, you know, noise, little kids running around. I love children. At a distance. You see, if I had lived my life properly, I mean, let me tell you how I could have lived my life. I was the golden boy, the oldest son in a German patriarchal family, the ruling prince. I could have bought Ampex at one or two dollars a share. After I built up Ampex, I could have bought Hewlett-Packard at about twenty dollars a share. I could be living exactly where I want to live on raccoon straits with a dock and a boat, you know. And my grandchildren could come and visit Grandpa.

[37:59]

two or three weeks a year the way I took my children to visit my father, and then all you had to do was send them checks at birthday and Christmas time. You know, it was... The saddest words of tongue or pen are simply these, it might have been. I could have bought all the real estate along, but I could have gone straight to it. 23 times before he was 18. So I had no sense of home. No, my father was in the insurance business and we just moved a lot. And I think one of the things that so shocked me within the past year was to look at how lonely I was. But sitting on the cushion this morning to look at how fortunate I've been to see the impermanence of a concept. And I felt so grateful. that it was just a concept, and that my idea of home was something, it's not a permanent thing.

[39:09]

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah? One question, Lou. If someone slipped a thousand dollars into your bank account, and you could buy that ticket to Litchfield, would you make it round trip? No, I, well, yeah, I would, I might not make it round trip back here, I might make it over to Europe or some place. No, really. I've traveled a lot and I thought I had it out of my system, but there's something about putting the basket on your back and hitting the road that still calls, you know. It'd have to be more than that. I'd have to pay off a lot of my debts before I could do that. So I'm anchored here.

[40:10]

We never get off the wheel. Is it correct then that the only thing that can ease the homesickness is sitting? As was said. anything you may have, your pain, your joy, it doesn't matter what, is a construct, a mind construct. And a teacher has said, the mind seizes on its own constructs. That's really where the whole thing comes together. We create this thing and then we grab it. And of course there's nothing to grab. It's like a hologram. You reach out for it and it's not there. And yet you can take and recognize that it was made up of real things, real light, real revolving platforms, real photographic film. All these things are, quote, real in the way we think of real. But the end result is something it isn't. And it's sort of the metaphor for our lives.

[41:14]

All of these real bits and pieces, these dharmas that you read about, we rearrange them and rearrange them and we see a pattern and then we say, that's it. and we grab for it. In the instant we grab for it, it's already gone. For instance, you cannot individually, as a human being, make a series of random dots. It's just impossible. But a machine can do it. Now they have these machines that make random dots, gray and black, and they show them to people and they see things there. That's how it is. Out of this random sequence of dots, which is the universe, we make up a story about it, and a pattern, and a picture. And we say, oh, that's it. That's my life. And the instant that we see that pattern, it's gone. Yeah. So being on the wheel, to me, means expecting that the next pattern is going to be the one that's going to hold together a little bit longer. But when you know that that's how it's going to be, you can just what?

[42:16]

So what the ancients say, you become a spectator at your own spectacle. You know, Have I got any more time? You got any more tape on there? No, I mean, how much longer have I got on there? You're not going to run out yet. Not going to run out yet? No, no more. Who here has not, negative, seen or read The Wizard of Oz? I want everyone to look around and see the motley crew that's assembled here. The two things that bring us together in a unity, we're all in the same room and we all have a connection with the Wizard of Oz. Now, why do I bring that up in this time and place? In the movie, you know that Dorothy and Toto, the Tin Man, the Straw Man, the Cowardly Lion, go to the Wizard to ask for Tryptican's heart, brain, courage, right? They all enter his presence separately. In the book, they each enter his presence individually. And they all have the common experience, but in totally different ways.

[43:20]

They're terrified. They each see more horrible things, they each hear different screams. There's a whole individuality to their terror. In the movie, you remember, Toto, the little dog, goes over to a corner and pulls back a curtain. And there's the wizard at work, yanking on switches, yelling into the microphone, turning the lights, running the whole show. Frank Morgan was the actor. I can still hear him say, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It is my contention that when you sit Zazen, in time, you will be able to draw the curtain back on your wizard. and watch him or her at work. And I will assure you, when that happens, he will not stop. But you are now seeing backstage.

[44:20]

Like you go to see the Phantom of the Opera out front. It's a scary thing. Go backstage and watch how they do it. The whole mystery vanishes. This is what Zazen lets you do. It lets you get backstage on your life and see just how it works. And once you know how it works, oh, sheesh, what was all the fuss about? And that's when you're home, you see? Okay, I guess that should really do it. Thank you very much.

[44:52]

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